What is FastText?
FastText is an open-source, free, lightweight library that allows users to learn text representations and text classifiers. It works on standard, generic hardware. Models can later be reduced in size to even fit on mobile devices.
FastText builds on modern Mac OS and Linux distributions. Since it uses C++11 features, it requires a compiler with good C++11 support.
Steps for Installing
- git clone https://github.com/facebookresearch/fastText.git
- cd fastText
- make
Text classification is a core problem to many applications, like spam detection, sentiment analysis or smart replies. In this tutorial, we describe how to build a text classifier with the fastText tool.
What is text classification?
The goal of text classification is to assign documents (such as emails, posts, text messages, product reviews, etc...) to one or multiple categories. Such categories can be review scores, spam v.s. non-spam, or the language in which the document was typed.
Nowadays, the dominant approach to build such classifiers is machine learning, that is learning classification rules from examples. In order to build such classifiers, we need labeled data, which consists of documents and their corresponding categories (or tags, or labels).
Video for FastText
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQvghqdefTM